Convert the Pedophile But Not the Homosexual

By Carman Bradley

Judging their own value
system to be “so superior” to any paradigm that entertains sexual
reorientation, Erinn Tozer and Mary McClanahan go so far as to deny the
legitimacy of even the client’s desire for change:

The General Principle of Social Responsibility states,
‘Psychologists are concerned about and work to mitigate the causes of human
suffering’ (APA, 1992, Principle F, p. 1600). Proponents of conversion therapy
argue that the refusal to provide a service that a client voluntarily requests
is tantamount to refusing to mitigate suffering. They further state that it
serves a ‘prohomosexual’ ideology (Gadpaille, 1981). Cautela and Kearney (1986) state, from both an ethical and a
practical point of view it is our contention that the decision of whether or
not to change an individual's sexual orientation must be made by the client
rather than by society at large or subgroups of that culture.

However, several scholars have
pointed out that someone who would voluntarily wish to change his or her sexual
orientation is a misnomer (Davison, 1976; Halleck, 1976; Murphy, 1992;
Silverstein, 1977). An individual's desire to change is a reflection of an
oppressive and prejudicial society wherein lesbian, gay, and bisexual persons
are considered deviant and inferior. Therefore, this request is not truly
voluntary. If psychologists are complying with the Principle of Social
Responsibility, they will recognize that the cause of human suffering, in this
case, is the sociopolitical context wherein the gay population exists.[i]

Imagine yourself trapped,
expending the prime of your life in bondage to cubical-style anonymous gay sex
(with HIV positive callers), wanting personal deliverance, but finding that
none in the GBLTQ community or the gay and pro-gay Christian communities offers
a shred of hope. What are we to think
of a community that proclaims “experiment as you wish,” “join if you want,” and
then refuses to help you exit? How can
a homosexual receive secular help or accept the grace of Jesus Christ, if he or
she cannot find professional psychological counsel or Godly Christian
deliverance ministry? The tremendous
cognitive dissonance caused by the deliverance of even a few from the GBLTQ
lifestyle, forces those remaining to actively pursue closing all avenues of
escape and to deny all evidence of such freedom.

To
GBLTQ activists reorientation therapies reinforce the social doctrine that
homosexuality is deviant. In 1975, the
APA issued a statement that urged "all mental health professionals to
take the lead on removing the stigma of mental illness that has long been
associated with homosexual orientations."[ii] Says Tozer:

If psychologists are to abide by
this statement and the Ethical Principle of Social Responsibility, they would
not implicitly agree that being gay or lesbian is deviant by acquiescing to
their clients' wishes to rid themselves of this ‘condition.’ Psychologists
would instead focus their energies toward changing the sociopolitical context
by being proactive allies to the gay community.[iii]

Tozer and McClanahan
describe the “affirmative” therapist as one who celebrates and advocates the
validity of lesbian, gay, and bisexual persons and their relationships. They write:

Such a therapist goes beyond a neutral or null
environment to counteract the lifelong messages of homophobia and heterosexism
that lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals have experienced and often
internalized….The challenge is not to find adequate resources but, rather, to
explore the client's biases as actively and honestly as possible when the
client tells us, ‘I think I'm gay, but I really don't want to be. Can you
help?’[iv]

What they and most gay
and pro-gay “Christians” advocate is talking the client out of his or her
wish. Tozer explains:

‘What about the client who insists, even
after this discussion, that she or he wants to be heterosexual? Is it ethical
to exhort someone to embrace an identity that feels untenable?’ No; yet, it is equally inappropriate to
suggest to someone that feelings of same-sex attraction can be redirected into
heterosexual attraction, given the absence of compelling evidence to support
that reorientation.[v]

Finally, an affirmative therapist can encourage a client to
focus less on the label of lesbian, gay, or bisexual than on her or his unique
experience. This can help the person take the time to consider his or her needs
and feelings without the perceived rush to have the ‘right’ identity. If the therapist continues to refuse to provide
conversion therapy, and the client continues to insist that he or she desires
reorientation, the possibility of termination emerges. Certainly, this should
not be a hasty decision; indeed, rich material can evolve from these opposing
agendas. The therapist can reiterate that she or he is not attempting to
recruit the client to a lesbian, gay, or bisexual orientation; at the same
time, she or he is not willing to collude with the message that such an
orientation is bad, immoral, invalid, or unhealthy.

If the client remains steadfast in her or
his desire to reorient to heterosexuality, however, termination becomes a very
real possibility. We submit that in such cases, no action (barring risk of
client self-harm, of course) is better than the wrong action. The therapist can
provide the client with a bibliography of resources that factually refute the
prevailing myths and misconceptions and that offer positive images of lesbian,
gay, and bisexual persons. The therapist also can emphasize that she or he will
be available for future nonconversion work if the client wishes to resume
therapy. If the client wishes to terminate rather than proceed with
nonconversion therapy; however, we believe that it is more ethical to let a
client continue to struggle honestly with her or his identity than to collude,
even peripherally, with a practice that is discriminatory, oppressive, and
ultimately ineffective in its own stated ends.[vi]
[my underline]

This type of argument
against ex-gay ministries was articulated by Father John McNeil, in 1976. Wishing to stop the treatment of
homosexuals, he writes:

The relation between a
willingness to change and success in therapy has led some clinicians to
advocate what from a Christian point of view is a morally reprehensible
procedure. Bergler, for example, speaks
of ‘mobilizing any latent feelings of guilt.’[vii] What he seems to be advocating is a
deliberate effort to increase the guilt feelings and self-hatred of the
patient. Beiber, who goes along with
this type of practice, reports only twenty-seven percent of his patients were
cured under optimum conditions[viii]. One wonders what happened to the other
seventy-three per cent who left therapy unconverted but burdened with false
guilt and shame concerning their incurable condition. To continue to hold out the false hope of a ‘cure,’ in light of
almost total failure to truly effect a cure, is morally reprehensible; for
nothing can be more destructive psychologically than to hold out a false hope
to an already disturbed person.
Connected with the issue of false hope is the danger of false guilt in
the case where analysis fails to change sexual orientation.[ix]

Donald
L. Faris, author of The Homosexual
Challenge – A Christian Response to an Age of Sexual Politics writes:

Can Homosexuality be
Changed. If a prevention was discovered
for AIDS which had a 30-60 percent success rate, what would happen? Would this
remedy be hidden? Would it be denied? Would it be attacked because it was not
100 percent effective? Surprisingly,
something like this is actually happening.
If an individual is not already infected with AIDS, ceasing to live the
‘gay’ lifestyle is the surest way to avoid contracting the deadly disease. But, far from being proposed as an option,
changing one’s orientation is the target of negative publicity among gay rights
activists. The defenders of homosexual
practice deny that homosexual orientation can be changed, despite the fact that
there are scores of cases of successful reorientation. They also suggest that practicing homosexuals
can speak more objectively about homosexuality than non-homosexuals or celibate
or ex-homosexuals, and therefore nobody should listen to people who say that
they have changed their orientation, or that, if they have not changed their
orientation, they are comfortable as celibates. This is a little like suggesting that only practicing alcoholics
can be objective about alcoholism.
Naturally, as far as the homosexual rights activists are concerned,
their cause is weakened when people decide to abandon the ‘gay’ lifestyle, even
if it is for the purpose of saving their lives or mental health.[x]

Faris
is intrigued with the responses of authors such as John Spong and Virginia
Mollenkott, who espouse a “pro-homosexual ideology,” to insights into the
causes of homosexual inclination. Both
simply assert, without a shred of evidence, that homosexual orientation cannot
be changed. Mollenkott uses the
argument that many famous men and women were homosexuals. She seems to be arguing, “Look at these
famous people [Oscar Wilde]; if they were homosexual, it must be normal and
healthy.” Alas, even longer lists could
be prepared of “famous people” who were alcoholics, pedophiles or
manic-depressives. Fame has never been
a guarantee of mental health, or even a very good argument for it.[xi]

What cognitive dissonance is
this? Referring back to the man-boy
“boundary” of age 13 for gay sex (psychiatric manual: DSM-IV), one wonders what
political agenda develops a construct which essentially states: “Psychiatry
should give up treating homosexuals who want to change their orientation from
partners thirteen and older (12 in Holland!) because there is only a 27 per
cent improvement rate and the process breeds guilt; but [I assume] says
continue to reform homosexual pedophiles who desire to stop seeking sex with
those who are twelve years, eleven months, and younger. Perhaps, those who think in line with Tozer,
McClanahan, McNeil, would otherwise
lock-up all pedophiles, as hopelessly inverted in their perverse ways and throw
away the key. The anti-reorientation
thinking is based on two patently false assumptions. First, is the notion of Bailey’s invert - that people are either
exclusively a hetero – or homosexual (a 6 or 0 on Kinsey’s continuum), but
never muddled in between. And second,
as previously explained, is the notion that there is a psychologically and
morally significant difference between sex with a 13 year-old (pedophilia) and
sex with a 14 year-old (man-man sex).
Moreover, it seems logical if experimentation can lead one into
homosexuality (Oscar Wilde Effect), experimentation with reorientation should
equally offer promise of freedom to those seeking escape.

Staying on the man-boy theme
a little further, one must ask: When society continues to try and reform the
pedophile, what should we do about the “false guilt” among the
unsuccessful? Does the GBLTQ care? The reorientation success rate for
pedophiles is even less than for man-man homosexuality. Is this grounds to stop their
treatment? What social theory simultaneously
asks 97 per cent of the population to restructure and re-culture to accept and
normalize the behaviour of the other 3 per cent - the so-called “GBLTQ
minority”, and also demands that treatment of men and women who wish freedom
from this “minority” must stop? This is
manic political hypocrisy at best. Why
are gays and lesbians so insecure about anyone wishing to leave the fold?
“Individual determinism” is okay for GBLTQ-identifying homosexuals in the face
of the overwhelming heterosexual majority, but the GBLTQ community cannot
afford such self-determinism among those wanting out. The idea, that the actual and perceived hope of exodus from
homosexuality is somehow guilt-tripping those who remain makes mockery of free
choice, pluralism and dare I say “individual rights.”

More important, what
Christian would tell another contrite heart, there is no hope - You can “come
out” only in one direction or label yourself bisexual, but never again
heterosexual? The magnitude of the recovery challenge is no reason
to lose hope. Shall a declared
pedophile, transvestite, addicted smoker, chronic alcoholic, or manic
depressive give themselves up to their condition, just because the recovery
rate is not 100 percent? What about the
bisexual who wishes to restore a monogamous marriage? Who has the right to say “no you can’t be helped.”